Y Combinator’s Plan to Build a New City? Not Actually Crazy

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Y Combinator’s Plan to Build a New City? Not Actually Crazy

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Last week, Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup accelerator that helped launch companies like Dropbox and Airbnb, announced it was launching an ambitious project of its own. The “New Cities” initiative will study freshly minted cities, and how to plan, design, and build them from scratch.

To many, the announcement registered as audacious, even for Silicon Valley. The language surrounding the announcement sounds like it's lifted from a half-baked VC pitch deck (“You can fix existing cities, which a lot of people are doing, or you can reimagine them from a blank state,” says Adora Cheung, who will head up the project with Y Combinator president Sam Altman) and details about the project's curriculum are scant (Cheung says "it's all TBD"). The surprising part: Urban planning experts find Y Combinator's new venture pretty fascinating.

Y Combinator's initiative, bold and nascent though it may be, is just the latest in a long line of schemes to remake the city. “Ideas about new cities are not new,” says Nikhil Kaza, who studies urban development processes in the University of North Carolina’s Department of City and Regional Planning. “But they’re intriguing... they all have influenced the way we live now.” Consider Garden Cities of To-Morrow, a book by British urban planner Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s ideas, which he published in 1898, described central city areas surrounded by areas of greenery. It wasn’t Howard’s intention, but Kaza says these models would later inform the development of suburbs. “It goes back to Le Corbusier, this idea of, ‘we shall build a new city, and it will not have any problems, and it will work perfectly,” says Luis Bettencourt, a professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute and an urbanization expert. Fast forward 150 years, and you see similar ideas espoused in Silicon Valley. See: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, Apple and Google’s new campuses, Peter Thiel’s harebrained libertarian islands, and, now, Y Combinator's "New Cities" initiative.

Cheung believes Y Combinator's plan is different. In the blog post that announced the project, she and Altman vow to avoid designing yet another “crazy libertarian utopia for techies.” Instead, Cheung says the initiative will look to models like Shenzhen. Cheung cites the Chinese city—a fishing village that in 1980 was designated a Special Economic Zone, to be morphed into a tech R&D center—as an inspiration and worthy example of how to build a better city. Today, the planned city is one of the wealthiest in China; The Guardian has referred to it as "technological nirvana—a vibrant, multi-coloured landscape of possibility, opportunity and creative exploration."

Shenzhen's not without its problems. The megacity is home to colossal manufacturing plants—like Foxconn, which cranks out Apple products—where millions of workers receive low wages and face poor working conditions. But as a model, Shenzhen highlights two contrasting schools of thought about designing cities from the ground up.

“One is very modest in the sense that you say, you can’t change anything about the political and legal framework or social norms, but we can get some of the most important elements of design right,” says Paul Romer, founding director of the Urbanization Project at NYU's Stern Business School. That’s the conservative approach. “The other extreme,” Romer says, “is you build a city and put it in a new zone, and try out different legal and political structures, and even try and create new social norms.” That latter approach is what the Chinese government did with Shenzhen.

That Shenzhen works is a bit of an anomaly. Romer says an approach that lies somewhere between the two schools of thought is ideal. Impose too much structure onto a new city, and you risk stifling the way people behave naturally. For example: self-driving cars may become more common, but it would be short-sighted to design a city's streets for them alone, which could prevent new innovations or modes of transportation from coming into the picture.

In fact, it's not that difficult to build a city that works spatially. "But that’s not a city," Bettencourt says. "It’s only the backdrop.” He points to cities like Brasília, Masdar City, and Songdo in South Korea, which were "master-planned" from the ground up for specific tasks (governance, environmental sensitivity, and technofuturism, respectively). It's not that these cities aren't well-engineered, "it’s that they’re not engineered for anyone in particular," says Bettencourt. "It misses the point that we should be able to change and evolve.”

That's where Silicon Valley might actually help. One thing the Y Combinator style of business is good at is identifying ways that technology can help people evolve. What is Airbnb, if not a more streamlined way to facilitate house rentals? “What you need is to have an ecology of technologies, and that’s what Silicon Valley has been good at in the past,” he says. No urban planner can design the perfect city, but a team of researchers could design all the right opportunities.